The traditions of semantics in linguistics and philosophy have overlapped somewhat in recent decades, but earlier trends and treatments in each discipline have dealt with rather different aspects of meaning. In this essay we hope to unite some of these different threads. It is a special pleasure to contribute to a volume in honour of Sir John Lyons, who has made major contributions to a theory of meaning.

In Lyons' early work (1963, 1968) the meaning of a word was conceived of as its place in the lexical network of the semantic field to which it belonged. A theory of reference - to hook up language and the world - is also a necessary part of the semantic enterprise. We wish to explore how theories of sense and reference can be related.

A word on terminology

The word meaning is used in many different ways, in both philosophy and linguistics. It has been used to describe extralinguistic relationships, that is, between an expression and something in the external world, and intralinguistic relationships - between expressions within a language or between those in different languages. Given the ambiguity of the word meaning, we shall try to avoid using this word, instead employing reference or denotation for word-world connection, and sense, which Lyons has defined as the ‘place in a system of relationships which it contracts with other words in the vocabulary’ (Lyons, 1968: 427).